Potential

Potential

Game Project 7 - First Person Shooter

Potential is a stealth shooter where the player navigates through a futuristic museum environment and execute security drones and turrets by avoiding their detection and finding a way to hit their weak points.

My main priorities during the Potential project was firstly to take shaders and concepts from earlier projects and create tools to make them more easily accessible to the teams' graphical artists. This lead to the creation of a collection of Maya scripts & Houdini HDAs that were bundled together within a custom QT UI in Maya to make them more user-friendly. You can read more about how the "Vertex Color Toolkit" works by clicking the name!

What follows are some shader trickery highlights, of which a lot used part of the toolkit.

Scanner

The main threat you face while playing comes in the form of security drones that scan for the player. I was handed a rough sketch by our concept artist and tasked with creating something that would fit. (see the concept art of Potential here) . The effect can be broken down into two components. The first is a vertex shader that moves the scanner by moving between two blendshapes stored in vertex colors of the scanner mesh. These were created with the "Vertex Color Toolkit" in Maya. The second part is a pixel shader that creates a soft falloff and a sharp intersection line where the scanner connects with the geometry of the world. It is created by comparing with the depth buffer.

Macro and Micro Textures

Implemented macro textures and detail normals to the default shader so that we could create more interest and detail in a more efficient way.